Russian Revolution AOS2

27 October 1917

Decree on Land, Decree on the Press

14 November 1917

Decree on Workers’ Control

1 November 1917

Decree promising the right to national self-determination

14 December 1917

nationalisation of all banks

7 December 1917

Cheka formed

January 1918

Cheka given powers of arrest, imprisonment, and execution

“a powerful punitive institution, capable of terrifying and terrorising the population”

Alter Litvin - Cheka

“a power which will have no other aim but to satisfy the needs of the soldiers, workers, and peasants”

Trotsky - the Cheka

“the November election was a national referendum on the Bolsheviks”

Figes - Constituent Assembly

“the town cannot be equal to the country… the town inevitably leads the country”

Lenin - Constituent Assembly

5 January 1918

Constituent Assembly convenes

6 January 1918

Constituent Assembly dissolved

“the machine gun became the principle tool of political persuasion”

Pipes - Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly

“imposters… bandits…state criminals”

Anonymous letter to Trotsky

2 December 1917

Russia negotiation ceasefire with Triple Alliance

3 March 1918

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed by Sovnarkom

89% iron ore and coal resources, 54% industrial enterprise, 34% European Russia (62 million people)

Concessions of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

13 November 1918

Russia renounces the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

30 August 1918

attempted assassination of Lenin

“we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds… let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois”

Krasnaya Gazeta - Red Terror

March 1918

Trotsky becomes Commissar for War

“a motley collection”

Ross - White Army

“strangle Bolshevism at birth”

Churchill - Foreign Intervention

“no concerted effort was ever made to unseat the Bolshevik regime”

Lynch - Foreign Intervention

April 1920 - March 1921

Russo-Polish War

18 March 1921

Treaty of Riga signed

“a hard peace”

Lenin - Treaty of Riga

“the Soviet leaders abandoned their cause of international revolution”

Taylor - Russo-Polish War

“we stand for organised terror”

Dzierzynsky - Red Terror

5 September 1918

Decree ‘On Red Terror’

“we are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class”

Latsis - Red Terror

17 July 1918

Royal family killed

“an old revolutionary of the most unimpeachable idealism”

Chamberlin - Dzierzynsky

“the communists may have controlled the railways… but not the hearts and minds of the people”

Thomas - popular attitudes

April 1918

State Capitalism implemented

"“he who does not work, shall not eat”

Trotsky - War Communism

“in the van with nothing to guard”

Westwood - Bolsheviks

3 million - 1.2 million workers

change in working population 1917 - 1922

“long live the Bolsheviks! Death to the Communists”

peasant cries - Famine and political confusion

“the reddest of the red”

Trotsky - Kronstadt Sailors

1 March 1921

Kronstadt Rebellion

“drive out these false communists… enough shooting of our brothers”

Petrechenko - Kronstadt Rebellion

“soviets without Bolsheviks”

Kronstadt Rebellion - new election demands

7 March 1921

Red Army and Cheka ordered to attack Kronstadt

17 March 1921

Kronstadt Revolt crushed

10,000 Red Army soldiers, 5,000 Kronstadt sailors

Kronstadt Rebellion - casualties

2,329 sailors executed, 6,459 sent to labour camps

Cheka response to the Kronstadt Rebellion

“a symbolic parting of wars between the working class and the Bolshevik party”

Fitzpatrick - Kronstadt Rebellion

8 March 1921

Tenth Party Congress; NEP announced

“we must not be afraid of Communists ‘learning’ from bourgeois specialists”

Lenin - NEP

“a Brest-Litovsk on the economic front”

Hill - NEP

“only a temporary devision… a tactical retreat”

Zinoviev - NEP

“making economic concessions to avoid political concessions”

Bukharin - NEP

“first sign of the degeneration of Bolshevism”

Trotsky - NEP

“no factionalism will be tolerated”

Lenin - ‘On Party Unity’

“only the Communist Party is capable of training and organising a vanguard of the proletariat”

Lenin - ‘On Party Unity’ - leadership

increased by 200%

factory output 1920 - 1923

1913: 80.0 mln tonnes
1922: 50.3 mln tonnes
1925: 72.5 mln tonnes

agricultural improvements

“electricity will take the place of God” / “Soviet power plus electrification equals communism”

Lenin - electrification

“the psychological benefit of owning land made life significantly better”

Malone - NEP

June - August 1922

SR show trials

6 February 1922

Cheka replaced by GPU

by the end of 1922

1/4 of the Communist Party’s members were expelled

July 1923

GPU renamed OGPU

“…continued a long tsarist tradition, but differed”

Leggett - Cheka

“the working class should spontaneously develop its own culture”

Figes - cultural revolution

“the illiterate person stands outside of politics”

Lenin - literacy

April 1918

compulsory reading introduced in the Red Army

“the Bolshevichki… prepared the way for the party’s seizure of power in October”

Clements - women

21 January 1924

Lenin dies

27 January 1924

Lenin’s funeral

“Stalin… has concentrated enormous amounts of power… remove Stalin from that position”

Lenin’s Will and Testament, 23 December 1922